The property market turned in early 2012,it was apparently to anyone looking at it closely,to decide to "not see" this in 2013 and pile into Detroit is the equivalent of a bus driver drinking 3 bottles of whiskey and attempting to drive his passengers home on a 200 mile road trip across a Peruvian mountain with no safety barriers.

Even a bus plunging off a Peruvian mountain only loses maybe 10 or 20% of its height relative to sea level. It's some achievement by this shower to manage to lose everything.

Ah come on now, not everything was lost -- I'll wager the annual fees (20%?) were carefully extracted each year, managing other people's money is always a hugely stressful business

Brendan Investments put millions of dollars in to Detroit properties having been sold on the highly lucrative "sales model" shown to them by Metro Property Group. The same "sales model" which scammed hundreds of overseas investors. In 2013 when Metro Property Group was taken to Court, by a group of investors who had uncovered the scam, Brendan Investments publicly backed Metro Property Group claiming they had no reason to doubt their integrity.

After a lengthy and intensive investigation by the FBI The owner of Metro Property Group (Sameer Beydoun) has now pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud and the Court papers detail how the scam worked, which is exactly as the 2013 investors who sued described it.

There was never a chance of investors making any money in this. The business model didn't exist, it was a scam by MPG. BI's investment fund is just one more of the hundreds of victims in this.

The top three listed companies are banks whose biggest assets, at 60% of the total, are housing mortgages, over four in ten of which aren’t making capital repayments. The money isn’t there you see, because prices have risen to 13 times the average wage in the big cities, and there’s precious little sign of real wage growth.

For those who could afford to stay in the game, the only way to borrow was by interest only payments. And if you ran short on rent versus mortgage repayments, you wrote the deficit off against tax and used the equity in the house as a down payment on the next one.

Making voters feel richer

Successive governments have rowed behind this because it makes voters feel richer. The big cities’ skylines are bristling with tall cranes, visual reminders that all is well as developers race each other to fat profits and banks chase fresh loan assets.

The media eulogise ordinary workers on averages wages as entrepreneurs control property empires worth millions. Services are nearly two-thirds of the economy and its main exports, commodities, for which it acts as a price taker, reach a world market that has lots of surplus.

Was wondering what was going on with Eddie and that picture of him on the back cover of his new book.

Now I know.

Here in a nutshell is the entire problem, Hobbs reverting to an observer role now that his player role has gone so catastrophically tits up for the supporters of Brendan Investments, as clear an example of 'shapeshifting' as we've ever seen, maybe we could get David Icke to submit a review of Hobbs' book to Amazon

Revealed: 'Eddie Hobbs fund' investors lost €13mBoarded-up €7,000 house is all that's left of Brendan Investments cash

HUNDREDS of investors who pumped €13m into the Eddie Hobbs-fronted Brendan Investments Pan European Property plc (BIPEP) have been left with just a single boarded-up house in Detroit valued at just €7,000 and €29,000 in a bank account.The fund once controlled hundreds of properties, but a single derelict house in strife-hit Detroit currently up for sale is the sole remaining property owned by the fund.Around €29,000 in a bank account, and a potential VAT refund of €53,000 are the other assets. The investors are nursing losses of more than €12.9m.

Liquidator Aidan Garcia was appointed to try to recover money for investors after Brendan Investments PEP collapsed into liquidation earlier this year.Yesterday, at a packed meeting in a Dublin hotel, the court appointed liquidator told dozens of mostly middle aged and elderly investors that almost all of the €13m raised by the high profile scheme in 2007 had been wiped out after failed investments in Germany and the crisis hit US city of Detroit.

The devastating losses were racked up despite the funds only being invested after the property crash.In response to questions from the floor of the meeting, the liquidator said he would look at a number of avenues in an attempt to increase their recovery.

Investors were told he has powers to look back through the history of the company to sift through how the losses had wracked up.Mr Garcia said that he intended to look at payments of around €4m that were made from the fund to businesses in the US to see if any of that money could be recouped, as well as examining the Brendan Investments fee structure - which saw the main fund pay 1pc of its value to a sister company owned and controlled by the directors every year.

Those fees added up to in excess of €2m paid out by the main fund while the company was in operation. However, the fee structure were clearly flagged in BIPEP's original prospectus, seen by the Irish Independent, as was the potential that investors could suffer a loss.DistressedIn response to questions from the floor, Mr Garcia also said he would look at whether the fund originally set up to buy high quality European real estate acted properly when it shifted into distressed America housing, something individual investors say they were against. He said financial results had not been filed for any year since 2014.The timing of the Brendan Investments fund in 2007 meant that many of the investors put the proceeds of their special savings incentive accounts (SSIA) into the scheme.

Then RTÉ star Eddie Hobbs had fronted a massive publicity drive to attract people to Brendan Investments, which he had established along with Vincent Regan, Hugh O'Neill and Dermot Flanagan.The four were originally directors of BIPEP and the sister company, Brendan Investments Property Management, which managed the fund.

Up to 800 investors - including families, small business owners, farmers, GPs, and even a priest in Brooklyn, New York - ploughed in €13m.The minimum investment was €5,000 but in some cases, including Eddie Hobbs himself, the figures were significantly larger.

Eddie Hobbes and Dermot Flanagan, who were non executive directors, resigned as directors in early 2015, by which time the value of the assets had declined to about €5.5m, according to financial accounts audited by PwC.

Last night Eddie Hobbs said he couldn't comment on the situation while the liquidator works through his process. He's previously said he'd suffered significant losses himself on Brendan Investments.